Vringo Soars 86% After TechCrunch Article on Google Suit

By Tiernan Ray

One of the biggest percentage gainers today among any industry is $31 million New York-based Vringo (VRNG), which makes software for social networking and mobile devices.

The shares closed up $1.42, or 86%, at $3.07, apparently propelled by an article postend on Saturday by Tech Crunch’s James Altucher, in which he argues Vringo might stand to gain billions of dollars in a patent suit against Google.

Altucher relates the story of his friendship with inventor Ken Lang during grad school in the early ’90s, and how Lang in 1998 filed a patent on ranking Web page search results based on number of click-throughs.

The company has also set up a Web site about the Innovate/Protect merger, which includes a link to the full complaint against Google, but also listing AOL (AOL), IAC/Interactive Corp. (IACI), Gannett (GCI), and Target (TGT) as defendants, filed on September 15th, 2011.

As Altucher puts it, Google could “go to $0″ if Lang and Vringo successfully sue for what Altucher thinks would be triple damages based on willful infringement of Lang’s work:

The company sues Google for a big percentage of those $67 billion in revenues plus future revenues. The claim: Google has willfully infringed on Vringo – I/P’s patents for sorting ads based on click-throughs. I remember almost 20 years ago when Ken was working on the software. “Useless!” I thought then. Their claim: $67 billion of Google’s revenues come from this patent. All of Google’s revenues going forward come from this patent. And every search engine which uses Google is allegedly infringing on the Vringo patent and is being sued.

Altucher is a holder of Vringo common stock, and said he would be buying more of the shares after having posted his article.

Google stock today was up $5.68, or 0.9%, at $646.92.

Fin

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